Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations A Critical Guide

of ‘other minds’ that merely accompanies our practice, yet which he is almost irresistably inclined
to see as encapsulating the meaning of these statements about others’ private experiences.
This message is conveyed in that sequence of passages centred on § 426, where the straight
highway leads right up to the picture - in this case of ‘other minds’ - that it seems he cannot apply
in the way that the philosopher is inclined to think that he must be able to apply it if he is to be
a realist about other minds. Just as realism accepts that the picture properly conveys what these
statements actually mean, anti-realism complains that we cannot really have any proper conception
of where the highway appears to be taking us, because we have no way in principle of finding out
whether what is portrayed in the picture is really so. Wittgenstein’s principal point, however, is that
if the highway is leading nowhere, it is rather because the determination to adopt either a realist or an
anti-realist outlook, depends on granting to the picture a role in one’s thinking that is doing no real
work, because the real work is being performed through active participation in the practice itself.
Arif Ahmed contributes an Introduction of ten pages, in which he claims that the
Philosophical Investigations is probably the most disturbing work of philosophy since Hume’s Treatise,
disturbing because it shatters certain images of mankind that have been important within the Western
Tradition. He follows a brief survey of the relationship between the Tractatus and the Investigations
by listing 15 topics that the Investigations is said to discuss, 10 of which are covered by his chosen
authors. The remainder of the Introduction is occupied with brief synopses of the papers which
follow. Whilst the overall direction of the volume is towards the theoretical rather than towards the
therapeutic, with possible exceptions in the cases of McDowell, Stern and Horwich, the end result, as
is usual with volumes of this kind, is something of a mixed bag, so much so that it would not be
entirely true to say that every paper critically engages with the text of the Investigations, as the book’s
inclusion in the Cambridge series would suggest. This would clearly be less true, for example, of the
three more therapeutically inclined examples already mentioned. Arif Ahmed has nevertheless done
a pretty good job of ensuring that the volume does make a useful contribution to our understanding
of Wittgenstein.
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